SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Arm Holdings, a technology supplier to chip firms, is developing a long-term strategy to hike prices by as much as 300% and has discussed designing its own chips in a move to compete with its biggest customers.
Known in its early stages as the “Picasso” project, Arm’s plans, which date back to at least 2019, aim for a roughly $1 billion increase in annual smartphone revenue over about 10 years, according to sealed executive testimony.
Arm planned to achieve this partly by increasing the per-chip royalty rates that customers pay for ready-made parts of chip designs that used its latest computing architecture, called Armv9.
During the trial, documents were shown from August 2019 in which Arm executives discussed a 300% rate increase. In December 2019, Arm’s then-CEO, Simon Segars, told Son, Arm’s board chairman, that Arm had secured a deal with Qualcomm to use ready-made technology under the “Picasso” initiative.